Thought Leadership

Open Letter from Frank Addante, CEO, Rubicon Project

February 21, 2017

By Frank Adante

Focus as We Look Towards the Future

For the last 10 years, Rubicon Project has been singularly focused on automating, optimizing and monetizing the advertising market. In that time, we have built a technology platform that includes buyers and sellers of advertising for desktop display, mobile, video, digital out of home, audio, and more. What we have created is a Global Exchange Marketplace (GEM) – one that allows publishers, application developers and advertisers to benefit from massive scale, increased demand from new markets and the opportunity to reach the more than one billion consumers through the Rubicon Project Exchange.

As an industry leader, we believe in always keeping our eyes firmly focused on what truly matters – our team and our customers. We are focusing on our core business strengths and mission which has resulted in a profitable business, with almost $200 million in cash on hand, and continued market share growth and success of the company for the past 10 years. As part of positioning ourselves for continued success we will be announcing the final step in our restructuring initiative—originally announced on November 2, 2016—which will further streamline operations, facilitate faster decision-making and enable the company to be more agile.

Today, we are announcing a management restructuring that involves the departure of seven executives from the company. We want to thank the people who are departing for their many contributions to the business. This management restructuring is the final step in our restructuring initiative and will enable us to reallocate resources to invest in growing our marketplace, as well as technology and R&D including mobile, video, orders and our consumer initiative.

We are committed to ongoing communication as we transition into this new operating model. I am confident that these necessary changes, along with the strength of Rubicon Project’s premium technology platform and value proposition in the global marketplace, has the company poised for success in 2017.

We have built one of the largest and most successful digital ad exchanges in the world.

Our customers and partners are focused on mobile, video, orders, and header bidding which are all performing strongly and continue to demonstrate the tremendous growth potential ahead for our business. As we announced in our Q3 Earnings Call we have accomplished a great deal:

More than $1 billion of annual ad spend

Top 3 mobile exchange in the world with more than $300 million in ad spend in the past 12 months

Orders (an area that we pioneered and made a big bet on) is a $225 million ad spend business

Video remains on track to surge past $100 million in ad spend in 2017

Header bidding has gone from zero to more than $120 million in ad spend with hundreds of customers live in market with our solution

Almost $200M in cash on hand

This success is directly attributable to the hard work and dedication of an extraordinary team of the best professionals in the industry. It’s important to keep in mind that building a great business is not easy. We have had to make, and will continue to make some tough, but necessary changes to our organization to ensure our continued success.